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50 Books About Boats

Pirates, shipwrecks, voyages into the unknown, floods and mysterious strangers. Boats provide a useful function in children’s books. Over the next few months I’ll be writing about my fifty favourite adventures about boats.

From fantastical nautical epics to salty graphic yarns, we’ll see how these stories form a central strand of children’s literature, and also learn more than is strictly necessary about blige, ballast, binnacles and barnacles. And I promise, no more iffy seafaring analogies.

11 thoughts on “50 Books About Boats”

Glad to see quite a few favourites of mine on this list, including Hilda Lewis’ The Ship That Flew, Night Birds and The Farthest Shore. Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe perhaps, especially the condensed versions I read as a kid? They both began with voyages, didn’t they. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner I also read as a kid.